Swinging With Spider-Man: Justin Lambros On Marvel's New Games Initiatives

You should release the Marvel
Superheroes games, or Marvel Vs. Capcom on Xbox Live
Arcade.

JL: Yeah, those are among my all time
favorites. I’m a huge 2D fighting fan.

Yeah, me too.

JL: Yeah, the Marvel Vs. Capcom
stuff has a definite close place in my heart, so we definitely wanna
see that stuff live on.

Yes. Get on it!

JL: (laughs) Yes, your majesty!

Will you guys ever consider an
internal studio for this stuff? I mean it seems like you’ve been
doing a lot more.

JL: You know, the movies have
definitely been taking a more hands-on creative approach than just
licensing [the properties] out to the studios, and there probably could be some
parallels done in the games industry. There are some relationships
that are probably similar to that. Currently we’ve got some long-term deals with publishers that we’re very excited about working
with. We’ve got a lot great, top-tier partners that we’re
excited to work with, so anything’s possible.

The creativity and what’s been going
on at Marvel, I think the sky’s the limit, which is really exciting
for me. But definitely, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, in some
regards, too. So I think there’ll be things we’re exploring, the West Coast office is growing for Marvel, and there’s a lot of crazy
new stuff going on. So nothing’s out of the question, but it’s
not a focus currently.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2

Alright. So that’s a “maybe”
(laughs)

JL: (laughs) Yeah I won’t confirm or
deny anything, but I know I’m not doing anything for you right now.
I’m definitely focused on 2008. It’s gonna be such an insane
year for Marvel games.

Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff happening with Sega Are those games coming
out in 2008?

JL: Yeah, absolutely. So the movies
Iron Man and Hulk [come out in] May and June, respectively, and then their game
counterparts, which I’m very excited about. The Marvel Studios
slate, starting off with those two films, is a huge initiative for
the whole company, so the games, naturally, are some really huge
titles for us. And we’ve just announced the fighting game, and I’m
sure there’ll be other stuff that’ll be being announced in the
next several months that we’ll be talking about too, in the future.

This is maybe a loaded question,
but, why have there not been very many good comic book games? I
mean, that’s my opinion, but I haven’t seen a lot of them.

JL: Well, one thing, it’s tough. One
of the big things -- back on the original Playstation, Spider-Man
came out, the first one from Activision and Neversoft, that was a
pretty seminal game. You were able to do all the things Spider-Man
could do. And that’s one of the big challenges. These guys can do
so many different things, from over forty, fifty years of comic book
history, so it’s a lot to do.

I think there have been some great
successes we’ve had: we’ve had some great Hulk games, Ultimate
Alliance, X-Men Legends has been a great success, the Spider-Man
franchise has done extremely, extremely well, and ever since the
first game I just mentioned. And you know, it’s a challenge, and
we’ve got a lot of different people collaborating, and there’s a
lot of different reasons. And I think we’ve learned a lot from
past titles, and sometimes there’s a myriad of reasons. As every
game developer knows, that certain things happen along with every
project, and those things happen to superhero videogames as well. So
I’m hoping it’s not the IP.

I think part of it is: it’s a tough
IP to tackle. It something that isn’t necessarily built for a
game, there’s some characters that aren’t as gameable as others,
yet there’s still games made for them. There’s characters like,
Iron Man, I think are an absolute perfect fit, but it’s a very
complex game, and there’s a lot to it. So your first iteration out
the door, you’re going from zero to a thousand miles an hour; you
gotta get it all right or else people are really upset with you. So
the team there, I’m really excited. The game looks great right now,
and I hope it’s gonna be one of those on the hit list.

Yeah, there was an old Iron Man
game, a really weird one.

JL: X-O Manowar.

Yeah, that game was odd.

JL: It was an odd game. That’s one
of those things I don’t know very much at all about, except as a fan, I
played through it a bit.

I just remember that it came out on
the Saturn. That’s all I really remember.

JL: And a lot of 2D fighting games on
the Saturn. Anything 2D and fighting on the Saturn, I definitely
owned.